I never thought the “reveal” would be easy. But, without a doubt, these past couple weeks have been extraordinarily intense.

The publicity campaign for my first book, “Confessions of a City Girl,” (Virgin Books) was centered around revealing my identity to the 800,000 people per day who read my “City Girl” column in The London Paper on August 3^rd, 2009.  The night before the “big reveal,” I couldn’t sleep. How would the public react when they put my face to the silhouette? To my astonishment, the response was overwhelmingly positive – that is, to my face it was.

The anonymous silhouette I’ve been operating under these past 14 months has afforded me a fascinating portal into the London psyche. I’ve had women write in with their own stories of discrimination and harassment in the City. I’ve had men profess their undying love for me, negating my previously held theory that it was impossible to fall in love with a computer-generated image. I’ve been cursed at, ridiculed, psychoanalyzed, and actually had people threaten to kill me!

A lot of my readers seemed to have had an image in their heads of the “City Girl” that didn’t remotely come close to who I actually was. In a nutshell, they expected me to be a female version of my column’s predecessor – a millionaire City Boy, about age thirty-five – and many people actually felt betrayed when I didn’t fulfill this persona. I was in my mid-twenties. And I was blonde.

Yet in some respects, I am more of a typical “City Girl” than “City Boy” ever was a “City Boy.” The vast majority of people in the City of London aren’t multi-millionaires by the age of 35. We do well for ourselves. We earn far more than the average British national wage. But the City is primarily made up of non-millionaires – the compliance people, lawyers, settlements people, etc., who make the City run – not the top 15% who rake in monster bonuses.

I have absolutely no regrets about my time in the City, or, for that matter, my decision to leave. I’ve started working as a financial journalist, and I am fortunate to have a “transferable” skill – writing – that I can take anywhere. But most people in the City don’t have this. As a banker, you are good at Excel.  This can be lucratively employed in a remarkably limited number of places, notably, in New York, London, Hong Kong, or Tokyo.

I brought my book out now because everyone is talking about the financial crisis, and it is written in a style everyone can understand – not only those who read the Financial Times.  My book simply offers a very human story of the financial crisis from the type of City insider who has always been an outsider – a view from the eyes of a “City Girl.”